Guild Wars 2

I suspect when they did the Powerpoint slide show of this planned league implementation, someone may likely have asked: “But how do we get enough people to regularly play for the matching required”?

And the answer likely was, “It is our hope that people will be really excited about the pips and the rewards and a LOT more people will play regularly.”

Let’s see how the Qs look after 14 days when a lot of tired people have lost very hard-won pips to pro teams farming on Twitch.

There is a phenomenon in the GW2 sPvP experience where you subconsciously attribute your blasting through opposing team members to yourself, rather than to the strength of all the team members around you debuffing, AOEing, condition-blasting, and softening up your targets.

In a well-matched SoloQ series of games, you will struggle to do much better than 50% wins. And most battles will be longer and a challenge to win. In most matches the score will be close all through the game. You won’t be sure you are going to win until the last moments.

Consequently, you will feel less powerful. So…for those who love to hotjoin-zerg with an overpowered team, it will feel like a letdown.

But for those who understand what is really going on, you will expect 50%, unless you and your team make some better-than-average decisions, and pull off some strategies in a better-than-average manner.

Just sayin’…be ready.

But clearly there’s a problem because people’s MMR is putting them among people that they have to carry. If MMR was accurate, they wouldn’t be with people that had to carry.

Since your MMR is determined from the teams you are placed on, it’s kind of circular.

The Leaderboards ACTUALLY show your TEAM’s rank.

So it seems like it is pretty much “rating suicide” to EVER do a tourney with a PuG team.

Because as a rule, a PuG “team” is of low “team ability”and loses to a real team.

Re: the TANKCAT build…it will not be as strong in sPvP, since it relies on confusion from the prybar attack (toolkit buton 3), and confusion in sPvP is only 50% of what it is in w3 or PvE.

I have started to just do hotjoin for practice during offpeak hours.

You will avoid the high MMR players in groups farming Unranked Q.

In hotjoin you won’t get a real match, but you won;t get a real match in Unranked during offpeak hours anyway.

How to set map points and draw lines and circles to show paths or target areas.

No more solo queing tourneys for me!

Watching top players on Twitch reveals how FAST combat moves in this game compared to typical “stand and cast MMOS”.

To be really good in GW2 you have to be reacting to the other player’s move. That means you cannot look at your keys, but rather you have to be looking at the screen the entire time looking for the telltale animations by your opponent telling you what he is casting….so you can instantly counter it.

Full disclosure: I cannot do it yet.

Justin,

Thanks for clarifying.

I realize you are not in control of all this, and the total PvP team makes the decisions.

But here’s a thought:

Long Q times turn off the top players (they get the longest Q from strict matchmaking)

Short Q times make them happy and all the rest of the people VERY unhappy (because they all get rolled and feel really ineffective and weak).

Looking at the MMRs, what is the largest population? Where do they cluster? I think that would be the group to favor in the Q time issue. The largest population of players.

The best time for the most amount of people.

QPT (Quality Playing Time) in player-hours.

Can that be arrived at by looking at blowouts and. assuming the loser hates them, and the winners mostly don;t enjoy them, multiply the QPT by 10 players * blowout match.

Also factor in QPT for long waits for high-skilled teams.

Compare and adjust to maximize QPT.

There comes a time when a well-adjusted, sane person realizes that these little somewhat random pips are not worth the frustration and constant turmoil and stress.

In our hearts we all know how skilled or not we are at GW2 PvP on our current class.

Pips in this broken system lie to us, both in how good, or how deficient our skills. Look at your games, look at your fights, you know how you did. You know. Just be your own judge.

I am a pretty good terror necro player, as long as I am on a team. But boy, when you are placed with new players as teammates who are running everywhere alone, you just get destroyed trying to move anywhere on the map alone.

Just sayin’

This is a good thread!

Of course the egos have to claim they have the skill to do it. <grin>

Video or it did not happen…

Why are so many of you insisting that win/loss matters, when the matches we all get are regularly lopsided, and when teams have a clear advantage over solo’ers?

A decision was made to turn off matchmaking over the weekend in the Unranked Queue.

It was known this causes blowouts as solo players get farmed by premades.

Why not set the matchmaking to high in Unranked, causing the majority of players, who are average MMR, to get a challenging match?

Yes, the queues would be very long for top skill players in Unranked.

But the majority of players would have had fun.

I don’t understand why they chose to let the blowouts happen instead of letting longer queues happen for the top skill players.

Justin, here is your recent reply to a player who had badly lost two games:

That wasn’t your imagination, you were predicted to lose both times.

1) Forest, was 2-1-1-1 vs 2-1-1-1 You had a slight rank and MMRs disadvantage though.
2) Foefire, was 2-2-1 vs 1-1-1-1-1, ranks were even, but you had MMR advantage. Apparently wasn’t enough to overcome roster disadvantage.

The second one is interesting, and I think some changes I’ve been working on will help.

Now then…here a player reported to you what actually happened and you have rightly compared to the Prediction and the MMR “balance” of the match.

It is only through this sort of analysis that you can find out if the matching algorithm and Prediction are accurate. Otherwise you could just be twiddling knobs forever and never really making it better.

IDEA: “Secret Shoppers”. People who understand the game and can play specific matches to report back to you what actually happened and why so you can fix flaws in the matching and the Predictor.

It’s a key reality check.

It took me a while but I, too, came to accept that as a soloer I am never going to be getting near any high league level. Probably stay in emerald, along with all the other soloQ people.

In a way, it relaxed me. Now I can go back to just trying to better my own performance and try different builds.

Seems like a lose-lose for ArenaNet.

Relax the matchmaking so the top people can farm the players who are learning.

The ambers stop playing.

The top players wait too long, and they quit as well.

Gradually as my wins and rating increased, I started having newer and newer players on my team, and the teams I was assigned to started losing at games with scores like 500 to 250. Every game.

Also I saw we were often up against coordinated teams that were very efficient.

SO…do I now stop tourneys until an actual solo-only queue is implemented?

I am obviously not going to win any more. I cannot carry an entire low team with my 35 ranking alone.

There are not enough players in the pool to give good matches sometimes.

You do realize that the way it works is that the lower and mid-range employees don’t get to decide whether to spend money hiring developers and testers.

Write a letter to the president making your case. I doubt if you will get anything back but a form letter thanking you for your concern and support, and promising great things ahead.

Yup. Feel free to ignore the leaderboard if you don’t like what it currently measures.

Instead, keep a thoughtful eye on the matches you play and score yourself for how much you think you contributed.

Ultimately, that’s what you have to learn to do, I think.

See a match as a series of situations and decisions to be made. Examine how well you handled each one. Measure yourself. See if you get better….regardless of the final score.

Being the analytical person that I am, I have been studying hotjoin and who gets the most points.

I stay in a series of games and notice that the person who is top with 280 points on match, can be at the bottom the next match.

The only time the same people lead the points is when at least two or three really good players manage to stick together for lots of matches. They bring whoever is with them up by 150 pts or more.

So I try to spot them and then spectate at the beginning of the next match so I can join them.

But this effect is also what really can mess up the mind of a new player thinking that they were great one match, and that they screwed up the next match.

90% of hotjoin success is being on the right team. And when you are on a strong team, it feels like you are super powerful.

And when you are on a weak team you suddenly feel like you are terrible.

zxstanyxz.8769:

kuben.9826:

I’m going to become alcoholic becuse of this game

always has been, and always will be the most fun way to pvp

Not for your teammates.

There are not ever going to be all that many players in the diamond or Legendary ranks. The GW2 PvP player base is not large enough.

And with the guaranteed loss blowout problem in amber/emerald, people seem to be leaving ranked.

So the higher ranked people on the leaderboard will be the people who gave their team a small edge. Over time, they would tend to win a little bit more.

I would expect that the win percentages of everybody on the SoloQ leaderboard would be pretty close. You won’t see any 80% win percentages.

My guess is that the top win rates will be near 62%, but the guy 100 ranks below will still be about 60%.

And even the folks in the bottom 100 will be about 40%.

This is assuming it really is only solo players without voice communications and is truly random team matchmaking with no significant cheating of any kind.

If you want to know what the new changes will be, just think of things that will make the eSports viewing experience more enjoyable. It won’t be about casual enjoyment, at least not primarily.

Cynz.9437:

as posted on other threads: once you reach above 50% win rate the game tries to bring you back to 50% and stacks all odds against you… so no matter in what tier you would fight, you would alway experience same effect

only way to counter is: make a full group of top players, put them in ts and farm everyone~

I think this is pretty much true.

If you win a lot, you will be balanced back to a 50% win rate. So as a solo player, enjoy the process==>the individual battles; forget about being a winner in a majority of your games.

I am an older player and I don’t have super fast response any more. So I play a phantasm mesmer in sPvP and let the fire-and forget phantasms do their work without me having to actively manage them.

That way I can focus all of my attention on staying alive and recasting the phantasms as needed.

What tips do you have for me about how to best avoid getting hit when they rush me to melee? They seem to be able to tell a clone from me quite easily and ignore the clones.

I use decoy. Are there some other tricks I can learn, other than dodging like a madman?

What have you found to be the suggestions that best help shape a pickup group into more of a team on Spirit Watch?

I am thinking that suggesting an orb runner and support, and a fast roamer to cap points, might be good.

For those of you who have tried to organize, what have you found?

(Let’s not rehash how much you dislike Pugs. We get that. It’s a challenge.)

For those of you who are much more knowledgeable that I am about how ELO works, please tell me if I am right.

Basically, it will always put you on a team that has a 50/50 chance of winning. Your performance is only 20% of the win or loss…80% is based on the performance of the other team members.

The law of averages means that the teams you are assigned to, will always tend to perform at their rating level: and have 50% wins and 50% losses.

So your rating remains the same, and you never rise?

To actually rise fast you would have to suddenly CARRY your team every match and start winning 90% of the time.

I just can’t see that happening.

Just wondering if in a couple of weeks there will be so few active sPvPers in Ranked Q at Diamond Level that Pro teams working toward Legendary status will do it farming Ambers, Emeralds, Sapphires…whatever is in the Q at any given moment?

If so, that would be absolutely ridiculous.

I suspect higher MMR players tend to queue with other high MMR players they have met and formed friendships with. Higher MMR solo may, sadly, become “carriers” for lower MMR players.

I don’t think ArenaNet employees are really allowed to answer here. At least, I don’t think they are allowed to speak their minds to criticize management decisions.

I always get lost when a person runs all their thoughts together and only uses two periods in the whole thing. Is this a texting thing?